How Arab/Muslim did Sicily became in the middle ages?
>>503379
What do you mean by "how Arab/Muslim"?
Cause this kind of threads usually are just baitthreads about someone not being white enough.
>>503386
I mean how much of the Population came to be Muslim/Arab under the rule of the Caliphs during the middle ages
>>503379
not very much, the normans rekted the muslim before they completed conquering
>>503646
Bullshit, there was more than 150 years between the Byzantines losing total control of the island and the beginning of the Norman conquest.
>>503379
It's definitely overstated because lolpoor&backwards. Genetically they cluster with Greeks, Albanians and Italians which is what common sense suggests given Sicilian history.
>>504058
>>503379
When the Normans came around, Sicily was divided between Muslims, Lombard nobles and Greeks. It was too culturally divided to be seriously "Muslim", but there was enough Muslim influence that later Norman rulers had their influences. It should be noted that the good Norman kings did actively use the Greeks/Muslim expertise available to them, so it was obviously there.
>>504080
>When the Normans came around, Sicily was divided between Muslims, Lombard nobles and Greeks.
Not politically. The Kalbid remnant states controlled 100% of the island prior to the Norman conquest.
If you mean that there were still Christian populations in Sicily, yes, of course (though probably not a lot of Lombards - the non-Muslim population of Sicily under Muslim rule was mostly Greek Christians and Jews).
The majority of the population of Sicily at the time of the Norman conquest was undoubtedly Muslim, but it's hard to say how many were Arab/Berber colonists and how many were "natives" who had converted.
>>504131
>The majority of the population
Provide the proofs
>>504131
>Not politically. The Kalbid remnant states controlled 100% of the island prior to the Norman conquest.
There's a difference between a map and practical control.
>>504154
Arabic sources during the later Muslim period describe Muslims as dominant. Ibn Hawqal, who visited the island in 973, complained not that there were too many Christians, but that vestiges of non-Muslim culture were still evident in the converted ex-Christian communities (calling them "bastardized Muslims" and saying their Arabic was bad). The only place on the island that's documented as being in particular a holdout of Christians is the Val Demone, which post Norman conquest also became a big site of Lombard immigration. We don't have censuses done by the Muslims but everything we do have suggests that conversion was widespread and Arabic was basically the lingua franca for the whole island.
The Normans conducted censuses in the 1170s-1180s. The surviving material is incomplete but it seems to paint a picture of Muslim demographic dominance in parts of Sicily in the later 12th century - Corleone in western Sicily was only about 1/5 Christian in 1178. But it's more complicated after the Norman conquest because of population transfers - rulers as early as Robert Guiscard moved Sicilian Muslim populations to the mainland occasionally. When Roger besieged Messina in 1061 it was described as a Muslim city, but by 1184 ibn Jubayr said it was basically Muslim-free.
>>504237
So what Christian state or ruler had "practical control" of any part of post-Byzantine Sicily prior to the Norman conquest?
